Who Profits From Ukraine’s War?

Well folks, it would seem our friend and comrade, Eric Zuesse, is on a mission. Having officially resigned his membership in the Democratic Party right here on our blog only a few days ago, he is now pulling out all the stops to expose the vast underbelly of the beast that is the USA politico-military-industrial-financial complex. He has decided that not only is Obama more than deserving of impeachment, but that the entire system of governance of the country is corrupt, morally bankrupt, deceitful, belligerent, and terrorizing populations around the globe while destroying the planet. And furthermore, he sees this as not a recent development, but a state of affairs that has been going on at least since the early 1950’s although he might admit to an even earlier date. He takes a lot of time, patience and words here to indict the entire corpus beginning with Clinton, Bush and the Obama administrations regarding our current situation vis-a-vis Ukraine and Russia. I give you Eric’s latest piece… “Who Profits From Ukraine’s War.” [Reader beware… the links alone will try your patience.]

(An investigative report, by Eric Zuesse)

To start with, an explanation is needed for this article’s sheer length:

The civil war now raging inside Ukraine is a turning-point in world history, regarding many different respects:

For one thing, this civil war was produced as the direct result of the 2014 coup in Ukraine that was carried out by the Obama Administration in much the same general way that the Eisenhower Administration had carried out the 1953 coup in Iran that installed the Shah there, but the impact of Obama’s Ukrainian coup will be even bigger long-term than that earlier one produced (and we all live with that earlier one even today after the Shah’s overthrow in 1979), because this one will either extend “the American Century” or else end it. (“The American Century” is the period of the U.S. dollar’s serving as the global reserve currency. Americans living today tend to take that for granted, but so too did the Brits when the pound was king, until their Empire collapsed.) (And see this, for a shocker on the global-reserve-currency matter: the battle over this matter could actually split the Western Alliance itself.)

And, thirdly (and we won’t go beyond three), Obama’s coup’s being right next door to the other major nuclear power, Russia — which is its real target — actually does pose the danger of a nuclear war between these two countries as a very possible outcome, which would destroy all of civilization. None of our earlier coups presented any threat of a nuclear war.

So, this report will be lengthy on account of the sheer historical magnitude of the stakes here.

An actual ethnic-cleansing — a campaign of “either leave or else die” — is occurring right now inside Ukraine as a direct and intended consequence of a decision that was made by, and that is continually being reinforced by, Barack Obama. From the standpoint of Obama, the ethnic cleansing is not being done with any specifically genocidal (or “racist”) intent; but, at the bottom levels (the level of the troops who are carrying it out) there indeed is a very strong ethnic hatred of the Russian-speaking population, and so it is overtly naziistic (or hate-driven fascism) at those lower levels. The focus of the present article is on the motivation of the deciders, the aristocratic psychopaths at the top of the operation, and not on the motivation of the far-more-numerous sheer bigots at the bottom. No one can understand an organized campaign like this if the focus is on motivation anywhere other than at the very top, since that’s what actually led the operation. Even if the riots here might look as if they were unplanned, they were highly organized, carried out with strict discipline at the very top — as will here be demonstrated.

A 41-minute documentary has been produced and is online, “Ukraine Crisis Today,” interviewing “terrorists” (as our side calls them) who have been bombed by the Ukrainian Government. We — that is, the United States — installed this Ukrainian government, on February 22nd, in a coup (falsely presented as a democracy movement, but run actually by the U.S. CIA and two Ukrainian fascist parties) against Ukraine’s democratically elected President, Viktor Yanukovych. The government that we installed is now bombing the areas of Ukraine where the voters had voted overwhelmingly for Yanukovych, in Ukraine’s last national election, which took place during February 2010. Our side calls the residents of the Yanukovich-supporting areas “terrorists.” Those are the people our Ukrainian regime bombs.

Professor M.F. de Noli, of Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, is the first person to fit the parts together to explain the profit-interests that are behind the February 22nd coup that overthrew Ukraine’s democracy, and that replaced it with a government controlled by a coalition of two nazi parties and two fascist parties. (The difference between these two respective ideologies is that nazism is the specifically racist form of fascism. The current government of Ukraine is 100% fascist, but it’s not 100% nazi. So, that’s the ideological background behind the civil war in Ukraine: both types of fascism run the government there, after Obama’s Ukrainian coup in February.)

Writing at professorsblog.com, this great historian, Dr. de Noli, noticed that whereas in “Berlin 27 Feb 1933, Nazis set fire the Reichstag, and Adolf Hitler blames ‘pro-Russian gangsters’,” a chief instigator of the 22 February 2014 Ukrainian coup was a leading Swedish nazi, Sweden’s Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, and that a remarkably similar tactic was used by Bildt and the Obama Administration to start the Ukrainian civil war. De Noli notes that this war was sparked and made inevitable when in “Odessa 2 May 2014, nazis set fire [to the Trade] Union building and Carl Bildt blames ‘pro-Russian gangsters’.” In both of the two instances (first, with Hitler, and then with Obama), a “false-flag operation” was employed in order to confuse onlookers regarding which side the perpetrators of these fires and explosions actually were on. For example, in the Odessa event, the thugs wore armbands with anti-nazi insignia but were actually from the two Ukrainian nazi parties, Svoboda and Pravy Sektor. They used those armbands in order to confuse onlookers to think that the people who were setting fire to the anti-nazis were themselves anti-nazis. This was a very carefully planned operation, and you can see here and here, video documentation of the thugs who did it and who are still doing violent false-flag operations inside Ukraine: these people are Ukrainian nazis, not German ones, but they model themselves upon the German original, as you can see from their own insignia, which are shown in those videos, and which insignia vary little from the swastika and the SS symbol. Ukraine’s nazis are rather bold about modeling themselves upon Hitler’s Nazis — the original nazis.

The more-elementary background isn’t provided by de Noli, and so I’ll just summarize it here (although I have done it previously): The U.S. was backing Ukrainian nazis, even before Barack Obama became the U.S. President, so Obama was continuing George W. Bush’s policy on this (as on so many other matters). Actually, the CIA was advising Ukraine’s nazis (both of its two nazi, or racist-fascist, parties) at least as early as 2004, under Bush’s regime. Due to this, for example, one of Ukraine’s two nazi parties, the Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine (inverting Hitler’s “National Socialist Party of Germany), changed its name to “Svoboda” or “Freedom,” in order to make it seem more appealing to the rising numbers of American libertarians or supporters of “freedom” or “liberty” (a slogan heavily promoted by America’s aristocracy, who crave liberty only for themselves: liberty from and against democratic government, such as freedom from regulatory agencies — aristocrats tend to hate democracy, because it regulates them and so provides some modicum of accountability, which threatens them, and they cannot stand any accountability, at all). Svoboda is one of the two Ukrainian nazi parties in the country’s present four-party ruling coalition, and the other two parties are merely fascist. The other nazi party is called “Right Sector,” which is a phrase by which the party refers to itself as being right wing, instead of as being “libertarian” or “pro-business” or “free-market.” Though these two nazi parties market themselves slightly differently, they’re actually pretty much the same.

A good background-article from Greg Rose, on the installation of both of Ukraine’s nazi parties into the Obama post-coup government, was issued shortly after the coup, and was titled “Ukrainian Ultra-Rightists Given Major Cabinet Posts in Government.” The same power-structure exists in the Ukrainian government today, though there have been some personnel-shifts, so that the article by Rose is still current. As per guidance by Obama’s agent on Ukraine, Victoria Nuland, most of the cabinet posts in the new government went to Yulia Tymoshenko’s Fatherland Party, which is an extreme-nationalist party but smart enough to avoid public idolization of Ukraine’s own native nazi, Stepan Bandera (the great hero to both Right Sector and Freedom), who had led Ukraine’s most-extreme-nationalist party when Hitler’s troops marched in and took them over. (The famous phone call during the coup, in which Victoria Nuland told the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine that “Yats is the guy” to run the new government, was referring to Tymoshenko’s main agent, Arseniy Yatsenyuk. Nuland chose him to lead the country because his boss Tymoshenko herself — who was called “the eleven billion dollar woman,” and “the gas princess” — was still in prison on a corruption conviction; she hadn’t yet been released from prison, and that’s why “Yats is the guy,” and not “Tymoshenko is the person.”) A very minor party in today’s coalition is Vitaly Klitschko’s UDAR Party, which is somewhat like America’s Republican Party, or Britain’s Tories. They received almost no government posts; they weren’t sufficiently far-right to suit Obama’s nazi intentions, which are now being carried out in Ukraine under the ethnic-cleansing campaign.

Immediately, the U.S. received a big payoff from the coup. A Right Sector official Stepan Kubiv was appointed on February 24th as Chairman of the National Bank of Ukraine, Ukraine’s Ben Bernanke. As I have reported on several occasions (here with links to multiple sources), “more than 40 heavy boxes” of gold were reported to have been secretly flown from the National Bank of Ukraine to the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank’s sub-basement at 33 Liberty Street off Wall Street, in the early morning hours of March 7th. This happened within less than two weeks of the coup. This gold would constitute about $2 billion being paid to the U.S. after (according to Victoria Nuland) the U.S. Government had already spent “more than 5 billion dollars” to install Kubiv and his colleagues in control of Ukraine. Ukraine’s total “official gold holdings” as of March 2014 were 42.3 tons. This tonnage was unchanged from the month before. So, on the official numbers, that’s what would have constituted the cargo aboard this flight. If each one of those “heavy boxes” contained exactly one ton, then it would make sense that “more than 40 heavy boxes” were boarded onto that flight. The first report of this alleged shipment was Russia’s iskra-news.info, on March 7th. Later that same day, Marcus Brooks of NewsWire-24 headlined Ukrainian Gold Reserves Loaded on an Unidentified Transport Aircraft in Kiev’s Borispol Airport and Flown to Uncle Sam’s Vault.” He wrote: “A source in the Ukrainian government confirmed that the transfer of the gold reserves of Ukraine to the United States was ordered by the acting [now permanent] P[rime] M[inister] Arseny Yatsenyuk.” Then, on March 10th, the Gold Anti-Trust Acton Committee asked the Federal Reserve system “whether the United States has taken custody of Ukraine’s gold reserves” and never received back a response. That same day, the zerohedge blog posted a commentary closing: “We hope, for their sake, they weren’t also just ‘liberated’ of all their gold, which after a brief stay 80 feet below the surface at 33 Liberty, will promptly find its way either to the Bundesbank, or to the billionaire oligarchs, based either in London or elsewhere, and currently in charge of ‘post-liberation’ Ukraine.” So: the huge unpaid debt that Ukraine owes to Russia is even less likely to be repaid, because the people in control of Ukraine started immediately by cleaning out the national central bank’s gold in order to pay back some of the mere $5+ billion they owe to their U.S. Government benefactors — and, of course, they’ve now got to pay U.S. firms for the loads of weapons with which to exterminate the residents in Ukraine’s southeastern half (as they’re now doing). Ukraine owes Russia tens of billions of dollars, and so Obama’s policy of getting Ukraine to pay off western banks and central banks before a penny will go eastward, to Russia, is part of his plan in the scheme.

My personal research has established that Carl Bildt was among the invitees present at the annual private international nazi Bilderberg meetings, in both 2013 and 2014, and that a major topic of discussion at both of those meetings was the planned nazification of Ukraine, the takeover of Ukraine by that country’s nazis. Both the Right Sector Party and the Freedom Party crave to exterminate ethnic Russians, much the same as Germany’s Nazis craved to exterminate Jews. So, the “racism” that Obama installed into power by his coup is specifically anti-Russian: an ethnic hatred of Russians. Other Bilderberg attendees during both of those years (2013 and 2014) were Christine LaGarde, Lawrence Summers, Robert Rubin, John Kerr, David Petraeus, and the heads of many investment firms that control weapons-makers and fossil-fuel companies (Ukraine has undeveloped deposits of that). Also present at the 2014 meeting, but not in 2013, was Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the head of NATO, which strongly wants Ukraine to become a member of that anti-Russian military alliance. NATO is basically the world’s largest buyers’ cooperative for military hardware, and it’s committed to conquering Russia so that there will be no nation outside (or independent from) Washington’s orbit of control.

De Noli points out that Carl Bildt “is a genuine US government agent” and a passionate supporter of U.S. global control, or as de Noli puts it, “extreme views on America … ‘über alles’.” De Noli notes that a Swedish newspaper reported that “Wikileaks has diplomatic reports that allegedly show that foreign minister Carl Bildt is communications officer for the United States,” but that Bildt said that this report was just a “smear.” De Noli notes that throughout Bildt’s career, Bildt has displayed a “fascistic approach to violence against demonstrators,” and that explicitly Bildt condems the anti-fascist demonstrators who were burned alive inside Odessa’s Trade Unions Building on May 2nd, in the incident that sparked Ukraine’s civil war — this event (carried out under Washington’s orders) proved to all Ukrainians who were of Russian ethnic background and whose mother-tongue was Russian, that they were viscerally hated by the group that the U.S. had just placed into power. Immediately, men in the southeastern half of Ukraine started acquiring guns, to protect themselves and their families from Kiev’s forces. Odessa’s massacre was seminal.

“Videos from many different clips, made by many different photographers, some of them even from the pro-junta side, tell, however, another story [than the official one]. They show that the ‘pro-Russian activists’ who attacked the ‘peaceful pro-Ukrainian rally’ in reality were pro-junta activists who had put on St. George [anti-junta] ribbons to make them look like pro-Russians. The videos show clearly how they collaborated with policemen who, just like the ‘false-flag’ activists, were dressed with red armbands [another pro-Russian symbol: both red armbands and St. George ribbons were pro-Russian, anti-nazi]. Their task was to ignite the ‘peaceful rally’ [the actually rowdy group of pro-Kiev soccer-fans] and drag [draw] them towards the Kulikovo field [in front of the Trade Unions Building] … where the real anti-fascist demonstrators had their camp [in tents, in front of the Trade Unions Building]. Also the ‘peaceful pro-Ukrainian rally’ was in reality a gang of football [our lingo ‘soccer’]-hooligans especially brought [bussed] into Odessa by an oligarch (Ihor Kolomoysky) supporting the Kiev junta.” (Kolomoyski, in fact, co-masterminded the massacre. Ukraine’s oligarchs — and Kolomoyki’s personal fortune is estimated variously at between $7 billion and $2 billion but is mostly in secret bank accounts in Switzerland where he had been living until his friends Yulia Tymoshenko and Arseniy Yatsenyuk made him the governor of a southeastern province, and so his wealth might be considerably higher than that — own the soccer clubs and know very well the political orientation of their fans and their tendency toward violence. This use of soccer fans brought in from the northwest was a brilliant move on Kolomoysky’s part.)

That blog-post then presented (it linked to) a video documenting that narrative. There is no question but that it is a truthful account of the event which sparked Ukraine’s civil war – sparked the war between the U.S.-installed Ukrainian Government, versus the entire population in the southeastern half of Ukraine: the half of the country where Viktor Yanukovych (the President whom America’s February 2014 coup overthrew) had sealed his February 2010 electoral win with huge electoral majorities and so became Ukraine’s President. This 11-minute video (and you can click directly onto it here) is devastating about the Obama Administration’s lies concerning this matter — the lies that are practically the only things that the U.S. public believes or “know” about the conflict in Ukraine.

Bildt blamed “pro-Russia thugs” for the massacre – for this incineration of pro-Russian Ukrainians. That characterization of it tested the public’s stupidity to its very limits (since it portrays pro-Russians as murdering their fellow pro-Russians; it’s an insane “explanation”), but the aristocrats who own “news” media in the West were successful at getting it over the line and into the public’s mind: it was the standard way that TV and even most “alternative” news sources have presented this matter. Incredible though that might seem, most of the public actually fell for this blatant sucker-punch from the aristocracy. It just goes to demonstrate how easily public opinion can be manipulated, even into believing things that make no real sense – things that defy the most basic common sense. It might be shocking, but this is the way things actually are. Most people are that gullible. (Without that, for example, Fox “News” would have no audience at all. Depressing but unquestionably true.)

Dr. de Noli ties Bildt into the U.S. White House as being on America’s payroll. De Noli headlines, “Weapon-Export Industry Behind US & Swedish Foreign Offices Instigating War in Ukraine?” and he writes: “One thing that stroked me was to read now in the papers that NATO is asking its ‘friends in Europe’ to increase substantially their expenditures in defense (read, ‘to purchase more weapons’), due to the ‘Ukraine crisis’. So, how paramount is the weapon-export business in the agenda of US & Swedish politicians instigating upon the Ukraine junta to wage both ‘anti-terrorist’ ops against their own population, and war against its neighbour [Russia]? Three main Foreign Office politicians from US and Sweden have [become] distinguished in pushing EU countries to provocations against Russia, and expressly instigating the ‘use of force’ (read weapons) in Eastern Ukraine: Senator John McCain, State Secretary John Kerry, and Fo[reign] Min[ister] Carl B[i]ldt. At the same time, they have asked NATO and EU countries to purchase more weapons ‘in view of the conflict with Russia’. “

De Noli provides an international ranking of countries on the basis of “Arms Exports per Capita in 2011” and shows that Sweden is #1 and Israel is #2. (Russia is #4, and U.S. is #8.) De Noli basically makes the case that Carl Bildt is thus ideally positioned to be able to profit as a middleman from assisting the U.S. to replace the Russian-oriented Viktor Yanukovych with the U.S. nazi-oriented government that now rules Ukraine and that now is being granted a huge line of credit to purchase weapons and military contractors (including former Blackwater mercenaries) from NATO countries (especially Sweden). He further notes, quoting from the excellent Rixstep website, that Bildt had brilliantly performed this same function during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. “Carl Bildt made millions off the US invasion of Iraq. He sat on the board of directors of investment company Legg Mason, managing huge financial holdings in the US weapons industry, and at the same time was a lobbyist for weapons giant Lockheed Martin. … Bombs rained with shock and awe over the Iraqi capital starting on 19 March 2003; Lockheed Martin’s stock value more than doubled in two years, from $45 to over $100, warranting its listing as one of Legg Mason’s most successful investments.”

Many links are provided there to Rixstep’s devastating data incriminating Bildt behind the invasion of Iraq.

However, that is a “per-capita” ranking; the U.S. is the #1 global arms-maker on an absolute basis, and America’s arms-dealers are constantly selling weapons to “allied” nations. A typical month’s report can be seen in an 8 July 2014 piece from Boiling Frogs Report, “BFP Exclusive Report — A Distillation of DOD Funding Priorities for June 2014,” which sub-headed, “DOD Spent $34,247,088 on 276 individual Contracts in June 2014.” It itemized a vast and rapidly flowing river of killing-machines flowing out to NATO and other nations, from the plants of Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Goodrich, and many other U.S. companies.

Overall, this history is an entry into the backroom hell that today is burning southeastern Ukraine with bombs that kill many residents and that cause others to flee to refugee camps that are being set up for them in Russia. The end result of the entire operation will be a reduction in the voter-base in Ukraine of opposition against Ukraine’s becoming the chief base for nuclear missiles that will be aimed at next-door Russia.

On another web-page, de Noli headlines “What is the ‘Ukraine Crisis’ all about? Why U.S. B-2 Stealth strategic bombers lande[d] in Europe — for the first time ever?” He notes there:

“The Ukraine Junta was installed after a coup engineered by the US [State] Department. After several visits of top US and Swedish government officials to Kiev – including Vice-President Biden and 7 visits of Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt – the Junta initiated a ferocious ‘anti-terrorist’ offensive against the Donbass region, targeting in the main the civilian populations in a variety of massacres described here elsewhere (See Ukraine Fascists: Three massacres in only one month). The conflict has been all along a direct provocation to get Russia to directly intervene militarily in Ukraine, with the domino effect that this would convey in the political and economic relations of Russia with various important EU countries. The geopolitical sanctions already in effect against Russia initiated at the initiat[iv]e of US and Sweden (I refer to political measures such as the G8 exercise [becoming now the G-7 with the expulsion from it of Russia]) converge to [produce an] obstacle [against] the Gas trade between Russia and some EU countries.”

All of these factors converge to portray a tightly knit international aristocracy that stands to gain trillions of dollars from arranging for the nuclear annihilation of Russia, via bases in Ukraine and other NATO countries.

That article about “Full Spectrum Dominance” is from Christopher Black, James Henry Fetzer, Alex Mezyaev, and Christof Lehmann.

Basically, what all of this comes down to is that the Bilderberg meetings have brought together the key people who have been setting this deal up for a long time. That’s where they have all come together to meet in private, out of range of NSA, Russian intelligence, and all other intelligence agencies, truly in private: all the “right” people, with all the “right” connections, making all the “right” deals, because they know ahead of time what is going to happen since they’re all agreeing together, in private, to make it happen.

This is the international pinnacle, behind the preparations for World War III. Trillions of dollars are to be made from it, and these people aren’t going to be receiving all of it, but they will determine who will, and this power to decide that, will make themselves enormously richer than they are today. The people they serve are the U.S. aristocracy and the ones abroad who subordinate themselves to it.

This is what the world is coming to, and how it’s getting there — and by whom.

If you didn’t know it before, the reason you didn’t know it isn’t that finding this out is so terribly difficult or expensive to do: the information provided here is all from the Web; and I’ve cited sources here all of which I have checked out and verified as being accurate: I’ve excluded all sources that don’t meet my stringent tests for accuracy. The reason you didn’t know this before is instead that the international aristocrats themselves own the “news” media. The only way to strike back at them for hiding from you what is in plain sight to any keen investigator is to cancel all subscriptions to them and to rely purely on free media, such as the one where you are now reading this article. Paying for news now is something that only fools continue to do, and aristocrats farm fools and have always done so, but the Web gives an individual the opportunity now to escape from the stockyards, and free one’s mind, even if one cannot free oneself physically from the pervasive surrounding reality of a world that’s dominated by corrupt psychopathic predators, because that’s where we all are and have always been. The euphemism that the aristocracy has crafted to refer to it is “the free market,” like “the invisible hand” of God, that’s really just the secret hand of the aristocracy. And this is the reality of it, not the myth that’s taught in college and university classrooms, which themselves spread the standard propaganda that was created for the aristocracy, as aristocrats’ weapon against the public that they control and exploit.

The civil war in Ukraine is the military crux-point by which America’s aristocracy aims to obliterate any possibility of opposition to its global supremacy. Dominance is what it’s all about — locking in, for a long time to come, the American aristocracy’s dominance, no matter how many peons may need to be killed in the enterprise to do so.

I am reminded of Naomi Klein’s book “The Shock Doctrine”, and thinking about the effects these policies have on people. First off, we must recall that the US government imported these techniques into their operations, we must consider what could be called “seepage” of these policies into the body politic. Just as physical and mental abuse unbalances the individual and renders them incapable of normal attachments, it does the same to society. We suffer from a sort of toxic shock syndrome where the poison has seeped into our system,

Just some thoughts, make of them what you will. We are kept in a constant state of turmoil.

What I failed to bring out is that Klein documented in her book the fact we brought Nazi’s and Nazi techniques into out intelligence agencies. It wasn’t just the scientists, the names i don’t remember, and I “loaned” the book out. It’s nothing new for the US to do business with Nazis, look at Henry Ford.

Not at all. One of the reasons we stayed out of WWII was so long was we were waiting for a winner to assert themselves. Probably would have backed the Nazis in the end had they solely focused on Russia and left GBR alone. Had Hitler not been such a nutcase he could have very easily sued for peace after his first few conquests, regrouped, and gave it another go. Fortunately for us he didn’t. Unfortunately for us, the US Nazis are playing their cards a little better with the benefit of hindsight, at least up to now. I think resource shortages are and will force their hands though. And I think they GREATLY underestimate the tenacity of the Russian people, a lesson the west definitely failed to learn after WWII, a war which we now know was won due to Russia’s sacrifices in the east and NOT the Johnny-come-lately US in the west.

If Putin won’t back down, and he won’t [and the Russians would never follow him if he did], the US will be ultimately powerless to influence the situation, absent nuclear conflagration, so that will remain the elephant in the room. But Putin has proven to be a master negotiator thus far, at least compared to the vast array of dim bulbs in the west. Putin is playing the long game, knowing full well that the west is desperate, for whatever reason, to gain a quick victory in Ukraine. Ands he also know what US/Ukrainian conspirators apparently do not: if the US were to win, the US will turn its attentions elsewhere in a heartbeat and forget all about the Ukrainian uprising they now support, leaving Ukrainians helpless and penniless to fight among themselves and fend off the western predators who will descend on them like the vultures they are.

One need look no further than the EU, Central America, and South America for the countless now impoverished countries the US and its IMF have fucked over and robbed blind. Why anyone would make common cause with these lowlife cocksuckers can only reflect their sheer desperation and greed. Which probably explains the US’ desperation in Ukraine. They realize that if Russia and China successfully break the western economic stronghold then it’s game over for western hegemony, the US dollar, and the western oil economy, meaning the US would be just another impoverished third world country. At that point, I can easily imagine Mexico building a wall on our southern border to keep us out!

Maybe someone here can answer this: When President Putin recognized the overwhelming referendum in Crimea and authorized its annexation from Kiev’s fascists, (an easy bloodless task), why didn’t he do the same for those Eastern Ukrainians who also passed referendums requesting a return to mother Russia? At the time, at least as it appeared to an outsider like myself, the Kiev junta had not yet had the chance to fully organize its forces. Would Russia not have also had a relatively easy time in liberating those regions of eastern Ukraine that wanted out? Wouldn’t much bloodshed have been avoided? In fact, didn’t Putin, for some reason that escapes me, ask the Russian Duma to rescind his power to act there unilaterally? Did Putin, whom I thought played grandmaster chess while Bush/Obama played checkers, err in not acting boldly to protect Russia’s interests while at the same time defending these ethnic Russians? Such a task would be exponentially more difficult now, wouldn’t it?

outsider, sitting here in Russia, I have the same question you do. why did he not do it back then? I think he was showing restraint… but perhaps that was a mistake. Or perhaps he showed restraint in order to highlight the belligerence of the regime, and by extension expose the evil infecting the very core of empire for the whole world to witness. Perhps he is the chess player!

I’m not an expert on that matter, but I assumed it was because Crimea had easily defined political borders and was more intellectually defensible as belonging to Russia, whereas Ukraine had already morphed into a shit storm with no easily definable borders where one could say this is Russian and this is not. And remember, Putin was on the defensive from the start, as he fully realized that the west was trying to turn this into a case of “Russian belligerence” so they could ramp up the calls for war in the MSM. The false flag downing of MH17 was just a continuation of the same strategy, albeit possibly being an attempt to decapitate the Russian head of government too. All of the above is a REALLY GRAVE indicator for where we are heading, as the war interests in the west appear ready to go all in now and lay their cards on the table for all to see, fully cognizant that mindless twits like somebody whose posted here recently will never be able to see through their smoke screen.

And from the link above, if the US is indeed forward positioning B-2s in preparation for a nuclear 1st strike, then Putin’s definitely aware that the US is ready to roll the dice for all the marbles. Prospective nuclear Armageddon will definitely bring out the conservative in you, at least if you’re an actual statesman like Putin, and not a sock puppet for the now completely metastasized malignant western MIC like Obama.

Ukraine will be the second Greece of Europe, and soon. Pensions slashed by half, gas prices through the roof, crown jewels sold to Westerners, civil servants slashed to the bone. Its industry is integrated not with Europe, but with Russia, and Russia will move to get rid of its dependency on Ukrainian factories as fast as it can, especially as some of those factories create key defense equipment, and the Ukraine obviously cannot be counted on to supply them in any time of crisis, going forward.

Those factories are not competitive with Western factories, and when energy prices skyrocket, they won’t even be competitive with Russian factories.

Ukraine has some hydrocarbon reserves (though much will be lost with Crimea); it is an agricultural breadbasket, and that’s about all it has going for it. Again, the economy will be opened by the IMF to the West, and whatever is worth buying, and throws off actual profits or can be downsized and firesaled, will be sold to Westerners.

Ukrainians, including the Western Ukrainians who think that joining the West will solve their problems, are about to find out that Russia’s deals and treatment were far more kind than anything the IMF will do to them. Eastern Ukrainians, having lost a war, and being FAR more dependent on Russia, will find their economy devastated within a few years. (This will make them far more willing to resort to violence again, of course.)

The key thing to watch now will be the negotiations between Russia, Ukraine and Europe to see if there are any NATO guarantees. If not, well, we’ll see what the Russian response is. Internally the Russian public does not want to attack Ukraine to take Eastern Ukraine, but that could change if an atrocity occurs or is created. More likely, support for an insurgency, then the Ukraine building a huge wall across its border, and as noted, economic ruin.

This game isn’t over yet. In a few years Russia may yet wind up with the East, with its citizens practically begging to join. Not mostly because of anything Russia does, but because of what the IMF does.

The claims of “invasion” and every manner of false flag incident will be constant until these stupid asses are put down like the rabid curs that they are, so maybe Putin would be better off just hammering them swiftly and being done with it. He’s truly in a damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t situation, which of course is right where the western oligarchs want him.